Step 3: Assemble Your Windmill

Step 4: Fire it Up and Enjoy

Simply light the lamp and watch the excitement grow as the windmill starts to turn. Faster and faster. Turning. Rotating. Spinning. Twirling. You wil...

Have you ever wondered what you would do for light and entertainment do if you had no power, no candles, and no television, but you did have a plentiful supply of bacon?Of course you have. But wonder no more, because I have come up with the highly entertaining Bacon Powered Windmill for hours of power outage fun.
We all know how nice it is to sit and stare at fire; well with this contraption you not only get fire, but a whirling, turning, spinning, rotating wheel as well.

I would like to thank Charlie at Goulburn Water Systems for the inspiration for this one.

Step 1: Assemble your Materials

Most importantly you will need a Bacon Powered Lamp as described in my earlier Instructable. This lamp is proving highly useful.

In addition to the lamp you will need the top (or bottom) of a large tin. I used the bit left over from making my Bacon Powered Bacon Stove, a length of stiff wire (high tensile wire or a bike spoke - that kind of thing) about 150mm long, and apart from some basic tools that's about it.

Make that axis permanent, not just balancing, attach a gear, drive belt to a larger gear, bevel gear, shaft, bevel gear, bevel gear, attach the middle of a shaft horizontally to that last bevel gear, attach a reflector to each end of the shaft, with a color filter of red drawn out from the first to the second, and blue from the second to the first on the opposite end. Ensure each component is made of a light, durable and rigid material (color filters as exception). Wallah! Bacon-powered police-ish light!

Rendering is (I think) the process of separating the fat from a piece of meat. Police are often referred to in a porcine sense (note - never by me, officer) and may provide a renewable energy source for nutsandbolts_64's idea for a bacon powered police-ish light - as long as the donuts/twinkies keep coming e.g. Chief Wiggum (Simpsons) or Sgt Al Powell (Die Hard).

BTW: I know and like many (all) of our "boys in blue" and they do a fantastic and difficult job. No offence guys. Respect.

Actually, what I described is very slow, inefficient way of getting things done. Might as well stick a vertical axis wind turbine on top and a couple of LED's. The marked cruiser when speeding along will provide incoming wind to the turbine and spin for you until a certain threshold, until which it will spin no faster (which is what VAWT's are good for, ability to operate in environments where conventional turbines won't, but at the cost of low, yet regulated, speeds).